dark days/vigilance

Torrey Pines, San Diego, Alta California.

There are finally glimpses of light -- most spectacularly the federal court decision today finding BushInc's domestic spying to be unconstitutional and, for all intents and purposes, a breaking of the law, an actual crime.
Hopefully the bits of light we are beginning to see are opening up the way out of these dark days in America.
But it is conceivable that the people who are threatened by the light will go to extreme measures to keep their power, which requires keeping things dark.
At this point, the glimmers of light are just glimmers. It is very possible there are struggles ahead, the big, social upheaval kind of struggles none of us alive right now have ever lived through before.
These are scary/exciting times.
Vigiliance is required.
Capitulation is moral death because of what capitulation gives in to: a hypermondern (the word can really no longer be avoided) fascism, a corporate consumer culture authoritarian society where a secretive centralized power fights an unending war against enemies over there and right here at home, bureaucratically managing the domestic population by doling out just enough bits of soulless, materialist 'good life' to manufacture consent through the corporate media screens that dominate our public culture and effectively hypnotize segments of the population.

For those of us who are Americans in the more profound historical-cultural sense, the political-philosophical descendents of Thomases Paine and Jefferson, who believe that a good society depends on the intellectual and everyday freedom of the people from a powerful centralized government that seeks to manage and control the democratic public in the interest of a small ruling class, we may have to face that haunting specter at the edge of democratic government, the fundamental principle that ideally remains poetic and theoretical: Liberty or Death.